assassination
Americannoun
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assassinations
plural
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the premeditated act of killing someone suddenly or secretively, especially a prominent person.
The meticulous way in which the journalist's assassination was carried out has led to suspicions that his killers were professionals working for state security.
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the act of destroying or harming treacherously and viciously.
They went after me with everything they had, engaging in character assassination and in destroying my reputation—a complete fabrication and frame-up.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of assassination
Explanation
An assassination is the murder of a public figure. Assassinations are usually politically motivated. If someone kills your dog, that’s not an assassination, that’s just murder (unless your dog was running for mayor). A murder is the unjust, illegal killing of someone. An assassination is a type of murder in which the victim is someone well known, usually in the world of politics. The killings of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinations: their purpose was to destabilize the government and hurt the civil rights movement, respectively. As assassination is murder plus politics.
Vocabulary lists containing assassination
American History I
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March Vocabulary Words
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World War I
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The dark comedy follows a miserable Mary Todd Lincoln in the weeks leading to the assassination of her husband, who will be played by the Tony Award-winning actor J. Harrison Ghee.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 30, 2026
US President Donald Trump will return to the White House Correspondents' Dinner amid heightened security on Friday, three months after an alleged assassination attempt forced his chaotic evacuation from the event.
From Barron's ● Jul. 24, 2026
Between 1918 and his assassination in 1948, Gandhi fasted repeatedly - against religious violence, caste discrimination and political discord - turning the empty plate into one of the defining symbols of India's freedom struggle.
From BBC ● Jul. 16, 2026
Representatives from Utah and California introduced federal legislation in March that would prohibit betting “related to terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or illegal activity,” according to a press release.
From Slate ● Jun. 30, 2026
After a failed assassination attempt on the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa that he blamed on the Sudanese government, entering Egypt for most Sudanese meant entering illegally.
From "Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman's Quest to Make a Difference" by Warren St. John
Vietnam, inner-city riots, and the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had cast a pall over the Day-Glo optimism of the Love Generation.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 10, 2026
Over the course of the war, Israel has claimed responsibility for the assassinations of several Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, widely regarded as a mastermind of the October 7 attack.
From Barron's ● May 16, 2026
It’s true that some presidents, like Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Gerald Ford, didn’t enjoy clear electoral boons after failed assassinations.
From Slate ● Apr. 26, 2026
To counteract viewer angst about all the dark topics covered in the news about Vietnam, assassinations and more, television leaned into pure escapism for most of the mid-late Sixties.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 4, 2026
Stanton believed that the Lincoln and Seward assassinations had exposed a Confederate plot to kill the leaders of the national government in an attempt to reverse the results of the Civil War.
From "Chasing Lincoln's Killer" by James L. Swanson
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
